Today is a momentous day for anyone who spent $3,500 on Apple’s “spatial computer.” The Vision Pro, two years after its initial release, now has an official YouTube app. It may seem like one of those things that happened a million years ago, but for various reasons, it actually happened today.
According to the official description of the YouTube app in the App Store, you’ll be able to watch the full gamut of YouTube content, including standard videos as well as 3D, 360, and VR180 videos. You’ll also be able to watch at 8K resolution, but that’s only available on the M5 version of the Apple Vision Pro. To clarify, you could previously watch YouTube videos on the Vision Pro, but not through an officially licensed app.
Instead of an official YouTube app, a third-party app called Juno allowed Vision Pro users to watch YouTube content through a workaround. Juno was eventually removed by Apple in October of 2024, about 8 months after the release of both the Vision Pro and the app.
© Adriano Contreras / GizmodoWhy on earth did it take this long to get an official YouTube app, you ask? Well, for the same reasons that a lot of big services don’t have native Vision Pro apps, most likely. The Vision Pro, however impressive it may be from a hardware standpoint, is still a niche device. Apple hasn’t exactly sold lots of units of its wildly expensive spatial computer, which means that there’s just not a lot of incentive for YouTube to build a Vision Pro-specific app. Just like there’s not a lot of incentive for Spotify to do that.
While YouTube has said previously that a YouTube app was “on the roadmap” for the Vision Pro, I think I speak for most people when I say that I never thought it would take this long. While we’re talking about the long road to a YouTube app on the Vision Pro, it’s also worth noting that other obvious services still don’t have a native app in visionOS either. Chief among those apps is Netflix. You can still watch Netflix through the Vision Pro’s Safari web browser, for sure, but that method obviously lacks the flourishes and refinement that a native app would.
Luckily, third-party apps have picked up some of the pieces for the lack of app development on the Vision Pro, but those still aren’t an ideal situation for most people expecting a polished visionOS experience. Supercut, for instance, a popular third-party app for watching Netflix without the Safari browser on the Vision Pro, costs $4.99, while the Netflix app is technically free. If nothing else, a very late-to-the-party YouTube app is a reminder that Vision Pro still has a long way to go before becoming the XR revolution Apple had hoped.
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